Mexico & Nafta - November 2006 ( ISSN 1741-444X)

President-elect Felipe Calderón Hinojosa delivered a major snub to his former campaign manager, Josefina Vázquez Mota, on the evening of 25 October, by announcing that she would not come with him on his trip to Canada. The snub reverberated around Mexico City's political salons. The political gossipers had already had already been speculating on rumours of a major split between Juan Camilo Mouriño, Calderón's unimpressive chief of staff, and Vázquez Mota. The buzz is that Mouriño has been plotting, rather successfully, against Váquez Mota, the architect of Calderón's election triumph in July. 

Mexico City's morning newspapers of 25 October had hailed the fact that Vázquez Mota was going to Canada as proof that the differences between the two had been exaggerated. Mouriño is a long time Calderonista while Vázquez Mota is a much more recent convert. She joined Calderón's campaign at its lowest point, in January 2006, when he could barely attract two men and a dog to his rallies. The campaign, up to that point, had been run by Mouriño. 

She shook up the campaign, and crucially, mobilised the contacts she had developed as minister for social development under President Vicente Fox. The social development ministry organises anti-poverty programmes in Mexico and creates networks of dependencies. Mouriño has not forgiven nor forgotten his humiliation. Mouriño has some powerful allies. Manuel Espino, the president of the Partido Acción Nacional has cool relations with Calderón and Vázquez Mota. 

So far, Calderón has only made one move in appointing his cabinet, which will take office on 1 December. He summoned Agustí­n Carstens back from the IMF to work on his economic policies. Carstens, almost certainly, will be Calderón's finance minister. Carstens had been second deputy managing dircetor, effectively number three at the IMF. 

Carstens is a technocrat; before moving to the IMF in 2003 he was deputy minister of finance. Almost all his career has been at the Banco de México and the finance ministry. He served in the first three years of President Vicente Fox's administration. He is well known on Wall Street and was the obvious choice for the key job of finance minister.

Carstens said that when he moved to the IMF as second deputy managing director, he expected to serve five years. In his resignation statement he said that he was sorry that he could not fulfil this goal but his country needed him. Calderón said that Carstens would be responsible for designing his government's economic programme, which would have the priority of increasing competitiveness, thus speeding up economic growth and increasing employment. Carstens's first job will be to draw up the budget for 2007. His resignation from the IMF on 16 October took immediate effect. The budget should go to congress in mid-November for approval before the end of this year.

The other significant move Calderón has made is to appoint Jorge Alcocer, a former member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and a deputy interior minister under President Ernesto Zedillo, to join his transition team. Alcocer was a prominent supporter of Francisco Labastida, the PRI candidate defeated by President Vicente Fox in 2000. Alcocer will be responsible for Calderón's negotiations with Congress. This was a job that Vázquez Mota had been doing. 

Before Alcocer joined the PRI he had been active on the Mexican left, notably in the pure-minded (ie politically hopeless) Partido Socialista Unificado de México, which was one of the precursors of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática. 

Alcocer has good relations with the anti-Roberto Madrazo wing of the PRI. Madrazo competed with Labastida for the presidential nomination in 2000 and then became party president before winning the PRI's presidential nomination for this year's elections where he came a poor third. The anti-Madrazo faction of the PRI is led by people such as Enrique Jackson and Emilio Gamboa, now the PRI leader in the lower house of congress. The only other likely cabinet appointment is that of Arturo Sarukhán as foreign minister. He is handling foreign affairs for the transition team. He has, however, started to speak out on foreign policy issues facing Mexico so authoritatively that he clearly feels that he will get the ministerial job.